Winter tree watering can save trees but will lead to somewhat higher utility bills

By John FryarLongmont Times-Call

Posted:
02/09/2013 07:17:11 PM MST

Updated:
02/09/2013 07:19:12 PM MST

LONGMONT -- City officials encourage Longmont residents to consider watering their trees during long warm winter dry spells, although they acknowledge that could increase those city utility customers' sewer bills, at least a bit, the rest of the year.

However, the higher utility charges resulting from winter tree watering are likely to total only a few dollars per tree over a year's time, said Bill Powell, the customer service and marketing manager for the city's Public Works and Natural Resources Department.

Powell suggested that that's "a good investment for trees that can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars."

Winter tree watering has an impact on Longmont customers' warm-weather sewer bills because the city's sewer-use charges are based on a customer's winter-months water use -- a time when the customer typically isn't using much water outdoors on their lawns and gardens or for washing their cars.

An extended wintertime drought, however, can lead to damages to a tree's root system and even the eventual death of an unwatered tree, and the city recently included guidelines to winter tree watering in its utility bills.

Among those guidelines: watering the tree's root system deeply and slowly once a month when the temperature is above 40 degrees; and applying a minimum of 10 gallons of water for each inch of the tree's trunk diameter.

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Eastside Longmont resident Kathy Lemmon said she waters the sizable maple and oak trees, as well as fruit trees and a variety of other shrubs, bushes and plants outside her Elliott Street house year-around and has been doing so for about 15 years. She said she realizes that'll result in higher sewer charges the rest of the year -- something she said not all utility customers may know -- but that it's worthwhile trade-off to do what it takes to keep those trees, bushes, shrubs and plants healthy through the dry winter months.

Lemmon likened her wintertime watering to making twice-a-year trips to get one's teeth cleaned and examined routine dental-care visits that might prevent a more expensive and possibly painful root-canal procedure later.

"It does add up," Lemmon said of the higher wintertime monthly water bills and the higher sewer bills the rest of the year, but "it's not like it's going to break the bank."

Lemmon said she agreed with Powells's point that it ultimately could be cheaper to water during a dry warm winter than to have to pay for replanting trees and shrubs that have died because of not getting enough water.

Powell said that if a person used 10,000 gallons a month to adequately water a tree with a 10-inch diameter trunk, the typical residential utility customer winds up paying about 25 cents a month more for each month that resident waters that tree during the wintertime. He said he calculated that number by using an average price of city water in the three lowest tiers of water charges, in order to account for different-sized households.

Sewer bills are based on the average water use during the three-month winter quarter of each year, and that wintertime average is then applied to utility bills for the other nine months of the year.

Powell said his calculations indicate that the amount of water used during the winter months to water the 10-inch tree in his example would raise sewer bills by 35 cents a month during the rest of the year, resulting in a higher sewer charges that would total about $3.15 for the nine non-winter months on the customer's city utility bills.

The actual bill, Powell emphasized, will depend on the size of the trees being watered in the winter, and how often the customer waters them.

"Trees add real value to the property," Powell said. "If a tree dies and it has to be removed, there is an added expense for the removal and then the cost to replace the tree."

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